To service compressed moving images by way of broadcasting, networks, or the like, there is an upper limit on replayable frame frequency depending on decoding capability of a receiver. Therefore, service providers need to limit their services to low-frame frequency services or provide concurrently high-frame frequency services and low-frame frequency services, with consideration given to replaying capabilities of the prevailing receivers.
To correspond to high-frame frequency services, the receivers become higher in cost, which is a disincentive to popularization. When inexpensive receivers dedicated to low-frame frequency services are initially in widespread use and service providers start high-frame frequency services in the future, customers cannot receive the high-frame frequency services without new receivers, which is a disincentive to proliferation of the new services.
For example, there is proposed time-direction scalability by subjecting image data of pictures constituting moving image data to hierarchical encoding by high efficiency video coding (HEVC) (refer to Non-patent Document 1). At the reception side, the levels of the pictures can be identified based on temporal ID (temporal_id) information inserted in the header of a network abstraction layer (NAL) unit, which allows selective decoding up to the level corresponding to decoding capability.